Current Trends Shaping Zero Trust in Government

As the traditional security perimeter dissolves, government agencies are turning to Zero Trust frameworks to defend against an expanded attack surface fueled by cloud adoption, machine identities, and insider threats. While many organizations have made progress, the Department of Defense’s ambitious Zero Trust goals highlight challenges in federated identity management, data labeling, and integration of security tools. Agencies are also increasingly leveraging AI to counter sophisticated cyber threats and emphasizing phishing-resistant authentication to harden defenses. Embedding Zero Trust principles across workloads, applications, and networks is now critical to achieving true cyber resilience.